Think Leap Day is strange, then try Leap Week

And your brain is likely sore from reminding yourself — or explaining to your children — why February has 29 days, not 28 every four years. If only the Earth would zip around the sun in a perfect 365 days.

Some brainy folks at a Big Eastern University have it all figured out, proposing a calendar that has 364 days — seven divides into 364 so neatly — and a perfect 91 days for each quarter.

The authors of the Hanke-Henry Permanent Calendar are Richard Conn Henry, an astrophysicist at John Hopkins University, and Steve H. Hanke, an economist at Johns Hopkins.

Henry and Hanke, apparently bored with solving the mysteries of the universe and the invisible hand, took a try at the Gregorian calendar that Pope Gregory gave us in the 16th century.

The H-squared calendar would be fixed. Every date would fall on the same day this year and next. Christmas would always be on a Sunday, for example. And your birthday might always be on Wednesday.

“Our plan offers a stable calendar that is absolutely identical from year to year and which allows the permanent, rational planning of annual activities, from school to work holidays,” Henry said in news release. “Think about how much time and effort are expended each year in redesigning the calendar of every single organization in the world and it becomes obvious that our calendar would make life much simpler and would have noteworthy benefits.”

So businesses and schools would know from year to year when holidays fall.

Calculating interest — and does that keep me up at night with worry! — would be a snap.

To get to this system, there would be some changes. March, June, September and December would have 31 days. The rest would have 30.

There goes “30 days has September, April, June….”

And to make up for the fact that the Earth’s trip around the sun is a not a perfect 364 days but just a tad longer, the good professors propose an extra week every five or six years.

The extra week would come at the end of December. Me, I’d prefer another week of August. But then I didn’t dig deep into mathematical formulas and computer programs to figure this out.

The professors aren’t stopping at the calendar, by the way. They want to change time, too.

In addition to advocating the adoption of this new calendar, Hanke and Henry encourage the abolition of world time zones and the adoption of “Universal Time” (formerly known as Greenwich Mean Time) in order to synchronize dates and times worldwide, streamlining international business.

“One time throughout the world, one date throughout the world,” they write, in a January 2012 Global Asia article about their proposals. “Business meetings, sports schedules and school calendars would be identical every year. Today’s cacophony of time zones, daylight savings times and calendar fluctuations, year after year, would be over. The economy – that’s all of us – would receive a permanent ‘harmonization’ dividend.”